Saturday, November 29, 2008

What woke me I’ll never know,Felt the slightest vibration left in the air,From a still echoing chime of midnight.In a room full of strangers.At heights above that of most mountains,On a night colder than zero,Up against corrugated tin walls,On a mattress thinner than a thumb,And as consistent as gravel.At some point I had fallen asleep.

Then I felt it,Terrified,This slight constriction around the knee,Then I heard it,The faint rumble rousing me awake,Sound barely a sound it so low.Then I saw it,Two slanted eyes squinted shut,Curving spine,Ears pointing up like pyramids,Rounded little digits,Escaping from under a stretched out chin.

…Hello cat.

Reached out to stroke her,Gently not wanting to disturb,Whatever feline dreams she may now be having.

The feel of cat fur,Felt like home,Long since left behind,Purring coil of rumbles,Breathing the night along,Keeping it warm.

"He thought -while his hand moved rapidly- what a power there was in words; later, for those who heard them, but first for the one who found them; a healing power, a solution, like the breaking of a barrier. He thought, perhaps, the basic secret the scientists have never discovered, the first fount of life, is that which happens when a thought takes shape in words."

.

-Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead.

TAKING -23/11/2008

The End.

Drinking from the fountainhead,Through a funnel,A well going dark and deep,Found and dove into it.

Recipe:Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead", the Himalayas, Solo trekking, Pre-disposition to self obsession, atheism, some perverted idea from Buddhism, and lack (nay, veritable drought) of intelligent conversation for the preceding few days or so... and YOU, gentle reader can be become and Objectivist too. And yes indeed, the uh.. "rapid hand movement" I retained for the opening quote can be thrown right back at me. ;-)

Sunday, November 16, 2008

What I can’t walk away from,Well,Limping my way from the table,That trekking handbook sitting there,Like a wheelchair to be climbed out of again.

So I’m doing it again.

Maintaining,You’ll have to drag me out of these mountains,On a broken knee-joint,On promises,Or knee-jerks reactions,To slip out,The door without leaving a note,Of concern,Regret or common sensing,That back home,His conscience can rest,In semi-retirement.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

He told you about his Ptolemaic system,His knowledge,On the ledge,Trying to centre the world,Within his world view again,An un-shift not carrying for one,In the equations bottom line.

He told you he’s flat-earthed,From a place where there be dragons,That he is Atlas-manning the last outposts,Of this absurdly heavy world.

He told you the story of a world,Created through accretions of a heavy mass stellar potential,Says that he has spent a billion years,Shuffling decks of cards,Mixing recipes of acid burns,To make proteins come good,On an old promise.

He says he’s waiting,A middle man for the cosmos,A dancer in a nebula,Foot printing species into fruition,Then waiting in the wings,For them to spread their wings.

Oh, he’s spun stories,Revolving around echoes of silent lights,In a fifteen-billion-year nighttime,Says that he has swallowed each sunrise a thousand times,For every thousand times,He’s been looked at.

And he claims,He is the night sky above,So he really can see the stars,When he looks into your eyes,…through reflection.

He has told you all of this,And you know,He’s waiting for you to look up and return his gaze,To share in his alleged star light.

We,Sat in the shell of an old building,Where more moments we are still creating,From those defunct assembly lines,No longer running,And fresh perceptions are seen, In those wreckages, wastes and unoccupied places.

We,Dawdle in the dust and detritus,The cracks and smashed glass,And the literal-heaps of pigeon shit,The scenic that we can see,Salvaged and savoured,In these abandoned spaces.

Re-contextualising the textures,Of a breeze on your face,Up a construction crane scaffold,Up ladders looking down,On a dock-lands light-up like Christmas trees,Finders of beauty,As few else in society,Take opportunities,Or the risk-daring to go see,We the discontented,In curious phrasing.Seeking,For a greater depth down,Found the unique,Obscure,Alternative,Above-and-below-all the adventurous therein.

We,Know an all-nighter,In a convoy of cars,Parking lots by torch lights,Huddling over street-directories on car roofs,

Concrete slants covered in wet footprints,Worming our way down side pipes,To grill rooms and gutter boxes,And finally the exit holes.

Wanting it all,We go get it,Climb over it,Dig under it,Hide out in it, Pass out in it, Get caught in it,Then make a run for it.

We go a culture-shocking,For some real-life capers,Strange Saturday sagas,All another way,To take what matters,Into our own hands.Looking at society's strictures,Those unimaginative not-so-grand plans,And from that limited brief,We've chosen to expand,

Monday, November 10, 2008

Well, jumping on the computer today, I created this new account for my blog in the time it took for my previous myspace blog to load up. Case in point, for why I am changing. No more advertising for the bands I don't listen to, status updates from people who use (phrases?) like 'lol', like that is punctuation, and who can't find the apostrophe on the keyboard, or the shift key for the word I.

I'm not a myspace person, or a youtube person, I'm not a chain emailing hey lets regurgitate a bunch of power pointslide shows about love and kittens and you really are my best friend type of person, I'm not a name dropper for the indie bands that I guess I should have heard of by now. Because I haven't. I'm not up with things, across the issue, or knowing where its at. I'm not deliberately trying to define myself or triangulate my stance here simply by rattling of a list of negations. I'm not unaware of the irony. I'm not saying weather I'm writing this with a straight face, or what I'm wearing, or not, I'm not venturing guesses as to your attire right now either (but really...come one, have a bit of decency, geez). I'm not trying to string this out for its own sake. I'm not lying. I'm not nearly as funny as I think I am. I'm not gonna let that bother me. I-AM gonna let that bother you.I'm not clever, not exactly stupid either, but you might not know it, I just have this kind of well... if the idea doesn't fit, use a bigger hammer approach to things.

I define irascible without being sure of exactly how to spell it. I made five or six attempts finding an address for this thing that wasn't taken (who the hell else wanted 'brainthatweighsatun' -that's not even how you spell... tonne. Ah never mind.

So here it is. The second blogging of Randall Stephens. You can reference all my previous stuff (about 170 entries going back to July 2006) at: www.myspace.com/brainthatweighsatun

I write poetry, or at least some crude bastardized vaguely hip hop-pun inspired version of it. I am not being self-deprecating (if a little deconstructionist and cutely post modern about it).

I'm currently travelling, today is the 201st day since I left my hometown of Melbourne, Australia, 8 countries down, 4 more to go. A not-so-small fortune spent in the last few months, and all so I can sit around Kathmandu wearing my Grandad's old cangoe, drink cheap coffee and scribble my way through the varying intellectual, emotional and physical instabilities I engender through these voyages. Interspersing that with the occasional travel observation, doomed-romance, religion-bashing or genuine piece of self-loathing. Of course, I do do a little more than this while on the road, but the above is the only activity that produces written material.

Uh, what else. I hate hippies but am slowly turning into one. I'm kind of left but can't stand most other lefties . I'll try and keep everything here as hypocritical and preposterous as possible, and you'll keep reading with that a mixture of enthusiasm and aghast disgust that I work to bring into this world. Deal?

...atta boy!(or for that matter, girl, excuse me, woman, or non-gendered pronoun preferring type-person, or hermaphrodite or disembodied consciousness, evil spirit, hungry ghost, or vicious piece of software whom is randomly probing the net and found this blog and might hack into it to fill it with porn like my ex did once and I'm still mad about that okay maybe she didn't actually hack it but somehow knew my passwords but either way she outsmarted me and it was shit and I know it was ages ago and I should get over it but getting over things is not really what poets do because we are the lot of us by necessity histrionic crybabies without any emotional sophistication and if you were it would hardly make for interesting stories like for example that time I....) . Anyway, whomever or whatever you are, thanks for reading.

I will endeavour to entertain more than I offend, but that is by no means a promise.